The present book is adapted from Stuart McKie’s PhD thesis, completed at the Open University, which offers a new and fresh analysis of Latin defixiones, regarding their composition and the social environment in which these curses were produced. McKie has dedicated much of his research to Roman magic and cursing, and this book confirms the growth of this field in recent years.[1]
McKie’s book is divided into six chapters, covering a wide range of aspects of the composition of defixiones from the Western Roman Empire (with a corpus of 607 tablets from 126 locations, as stated in p. 9). After summarizing his goals, McKie offers in Chapter 1 an introductory study on ancient magic and curse tablets, in dialogue with the already existent bibliography on ancient magic.
Chapter 2 (‘Cursing and Religion in the Roman West’) provides a statistical account of the dissemination of Latin curse tablets across the Roman Empire, and notes a few aspects to the increasing of such practice, namely the spread of literacy. McKie also presents a brief survey on these practices and their relationship to civic religion.
Chapter 3 (‘Rituals, Gestures and Movements’) offers a stimulating analysis of all the stages of the production of curse tablets. We are used to reading them in their final form, but, as McKie notes, one should bear in mind that every curse tablet is the result of a detailed step-by-step procedure that must be followed to achieve the final object and text. McKie highlights the background for the production of curse tablets, from the choice of material to the act of inscribing. Finally, the tablet had to be buried in the proper place, often a cemetery (pp. 29–39). McKie develops, in a captivating style, a description of all of these procedures necessary in order to perform a curse, from beginning to end.
Chapter 4 (‘Motives and Social Frameworks’) focuses on reasons and motives to write a curse tablet. McKie starts by noting the importance of Audollent’s pioneering study Defixionum Tabellae (Paris, 1904), but he seeks to offer a deeper survey. Through analysis of the most common types of curses (namely theft, competition, juridical, and erotic), McKie departs from the cataloguing approach of Audollent and Faraone to offer a further exploration of these categories.[2] The second part of the chapter focuses on the social situations which may lead someone to have recourse to a curse, with a focus on the relation between curser and cursed before the practice of the ritual.[3] McKie emphasizes the social contexts where curses could be produced and the social effects intended both for cursers and cursed, notably regarding gossip among the community. Many examples of curse tablets are presented to better illustrate these features, and fresh analyses are made of the secrecy that usually surrounds such magical practices.
The last chapter, ‘Agency, Power and Relationships’, starts by dealing with the relation between cursers and the divine, arguing that the cursers resort to curse tablets as a secondary channel to access the gods since the canonical means of approaching the gods were highly controlled. McKie also highlights the ‘magical’ significance of language choice: for example, writing a tablet in another language besides Latin, or writing Latin using the Greek alphabet. Finally, he focuses on the identification of the victims, as this helps understand the societies in which curses are made. He, for example, examines the use of the mother’s name as a way of obscuring the curse and acting as a reversal of the social order (p. 124).
The final part of the book, after the epilogue, consists of an appendix with a select catalogue of curses (pp. 133–244), where McKie provides the texts and his own translations of almost all the Greek and Latin curses mentioned throughout the book.[4] Together with the text and translation, information is given regarding each tablet’s date, as well as bibliography and notes. This is very valuable material, since it provides in a clear and fresh style a systematic group of translations which are most needed and sometimes difficult to find. McKie thus makes these fascinating texts accessible to a wider audience.
The bibliography is a comprehensive list of titles which will undoubtedly be useful to scholars. I would note only the absence of the second edition of Daniel Ogden’s source book Magic, Witchcraft and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Oxford, 2002), a useful source on curse tablets that also provides further bibliography.
In sum, it was a pleasure to read this book and to (re)think curse tablets, which are far more complex than they might seem at first glance. Besides his clear style, one must praise McKie’s approach, which offers fresh insights into the texts of curse tablets. Without neglecting pioneering earlier studies on curse tablets (particularly Audollent and Faraone), McKie has succeeded in taking a deeper look at the social contexts where curses were written, analyzing both sides: the curser’s and the victim’s. This book is indispensable reading for everyone interested in ancient magic and cursing, but also for anyone interested in ancient cultural and social contexts.
Notes
[1] I would call attention also to the recent works of Z. Papakonstantinou (Cursing for Justice: Magic, Disputes, and the Law Courts in Classical Athens. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021) and E. Suárez de la Torre (Eros mágico. Recetas eróticas mágicas del mundo antiguo. Zaragoza: Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza, 2021, reviewed here); and to the most recent collection of defixiones by C. Sánchez Natalias, Sylloge of Defixiones from the Roman West: A Comprehensive Collection of Curse Tablets from the Fourth Century BCE to the Fifth Century CE. Oxford: BAR Publishing, 2022, reviewed in BMCR 2022.10.38. Reference must also be made to the project ‘Curses in Context’.
[2] “The Agonistic Context of Early Greek Binding Spells”, in C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink (eds.), Magika Hiera. Ancient Greek Magic and Religion. Oxford, 1991, 3–32.
[3] “My argument throughout is based on the understanding that the relationships between cursers and victims do not begin and end with the writing and deposition of a curse tablet, but are considerably more complicated, spanning far greater lengths of time both before and after the specific circumstance that triggered the curse and the performance of the cursing ritual.” (McKie, p. 84)
[4] Other translations are also drawn from R. S. O. Tomlin, ‘The Curse Tablets’, in B. Cunliffe (ed.), The Temple of Sulis Minerva and Bath … Oxford, 1988, and J. Gager, Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World. Oxford, 1992.